i tried tried tried
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islam needs a martin luther
TUESDAY, MAY 22, 2007
Islam Needs A Martin Luther
Islam Needs a Martin Luther
By Marvin X
The Islamic world needs a Martin Luther, someone to usher in an Age of Reform that will radically alter some of the fundamental values of Islam that are retrograde, archaic, primitive and must be discarded into the dustbin of Muslim history so that Islam can regain its position as a culture of enlightenment rather than darkness.
At an Islamic Art Conference I attended this past weekend in Oakland, California, along with Muslims from around the world, there was discussion of how Islam has suppressed artists, calling Muslim art haram (religiously proscribed), shirk (associating partners with God) and other negative terms that essentially condemn Islamic art as evil. When I addressed the audience, I noted that I am the “father of Islamic literature in America” by default because other Muslim writers were told to give up the art of writing, creative anyway, but I ignored the ban and thus my work is all that remains, aside from poet Sam Hamad and a few others who’ve written during the last forty years that may surface with proper research. Not only writers, but painters, musicians, dancers, singers and others were suppressed. Even minister Farrakhan, a musician and singer, was made to give up his art.
But we know it is artists who give people visions and prophecy, thus when they are suppressed, the people are likely to walk in darkness as we see at the present moment.
In my remarks at the conference, I challenged the Muslim artists to be revolutionary and yes, disobedient—to hell with those who desire to suppress Muslim art, they are the backward ones, they are the evil ones and must be opposed by, yes, any means necessary.
So much that goes for Islam is ancient and primitive, really, not worthy of discussion in the modern world among people of intelligence. Elijah Muhammad used to say the wisdom of this world is exhausted, and this includes Islam. It must be revolutionized or thrown into the dustbin of ancient thought.
The Islamic revolution must, will and shall be led by Muslim artists with vision for a day when Islamic culture will be the vanguard of world culture, projecting the most positive and scientific aspects of the new millennium.
Islamic culture must come from behind the veil, or if anything, put the veil on men and let the women march forth as harbingers of the new world order. Contrary to what men think, women have been found to be the most advanced sector of society, intellectually and spiritually, so we would do well to listen to them for answers to the right path. Clearly, Muslim men are not on sirat al-mustaqim (“the straight path”). Over a billion people of Islamic faith are currently steeped in poverty, ignorance and disease, wallowing in political oppression of the most backward, Stalinist variety. And when the politicians are not oppressing, the mullahs and Imams do the same work, even to the point of following the Christians in the sexual exploitation of boys and girls.
Let a Muslim Martin Luther step to the front of the line and represent the way of truth, freedom, justice and equality. Muslim collaborators with imperialism, colonialism, and all manner of retrograde religiosity and political oppression must be condemned. Islamic scholars whose theology is based on primitive laws, edicts, fatwas must be ostracized because their actions only add to the utter confusion and ignorance pervading the Muslim world.
Surely, the destruction the Tsunami brought to South Asia is a sign of Allah’s displeasure with the Muslim people, along with Christians, Hindus and others. If we continue down the path of primitive worship of myths and rituals, surely Allah has even greater destruction planned for those without eyes, ears, the deaf, dumb and blind. After Allah has blessed us with light, how can we yet walk in darkness? How can we possess “supreme wisdom” yet have nothing, behave as spiritual slaves to any storefront imam with a rote memory of Al-Qur’an?
Let a Martin Luther Muslim arise to destroy idols of ignorance and suppression of creativity. Yes, let everything praise Allah, from the flute to the lute, from the dancer to the poet.
Marvin X is a distinguished poet, playwright and essayist of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). He is the founder and director of Recovery Theatre in San Francisco. He also co-founded the Black Arts/West Theatre and Black House, which served briefly as the headquarters for the Black Panther Party and as a center for performance, theatre, poetry and music in the Bay Area. Marvin X continues to work as a lecturer, teacher and producer.
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By Marvin X
The Islamic world needs a Martin Luther, someone to usher in an Age of Reform that will radically alter some of the fundamental values of Islam that are retrograde, archaic, primitive and must be discarded into the dustbin of Muslim history so that Islam can regain its position as a culture of enlightenment rather than darkness.
At an Islamic Art Conference I attended this past weekend in Oakland, California, along with Muslims from around the world, there was discussion of how Islam has suppressed artists, calling Muslim art haram (religiously proscribed), shirk (associating partners with God) and other negative terms that essentially condemn Islamic art as evil. When I addressed the audience, I noted that I am the “father of Islamic literature in America” by default because other Muslim writers were told to give up the art of writing, creative anyway, but I ignored the ban and thus my work is all that remains, aside from poet Sam Hamad and a few others who’ve written during the last forty years that may surface with proper research. Not only writers, but painters, musicians, dancers, singers and others were suppressed. Even minister Farrakhan, a musician and singer, was made to give up his art.
But we know it is artists who give people visions and prophecy, thus when they are suppressed, the people are likely to walk in darkness as we see at the present moment.
In my remarks at the conference, I challenged the Muslim artists to be revolutionary and yes, disobedient—to hell with those who desire to suppress Muslim art, they are the backward ones, they are the evil ones and must be opposed by, yes, any means necessary.
So much that goes for Islam is ancient and primitive, really, not worthy of discussion in the modern world among people of intelligence. Elijah Muhammad used to say the wisdom of this world is exhausted, and this includes Islam. It must be revolutionized or thrown into the dustbin of ancient thought.
The Islamic revolution must, will and shall be led by Muslim artists with vision for a day when Islamic culture will be the vanguard of world culture, projecting the most positive and scientific aspects of the new millennium.
Islamic culture must come from behind the veil, or if anything, put the veil on men and let the women march forth as harbingers of the new world order. Contrary to what men think, women have been found to be the most advanced sector of society, intellectually and spiritually, so we would do well to listen to them for answers to the right path. Clearly, Muslim men are not on sirat al-mustaqim (“the straight path”). Over a billion people of Islamic faith are currently steeped in poverty, ignorance and disease, wallowing in political oppression of the most backward, Stalinist variety. And when the politicians are not oppressing, the mullahs and Imams do the same work, even to the point of following the Christians in the sexual exploitation of boys and girls.
Let a Muslim Martin Luther step to the front of the line and represent the way of truth, freedom, justice and equality. Muslim collaborators with imperialism, colonialism, and all manner of retrograde religiosity and political oppression must be condemned. Islamic scholars whose theology is based on primitive laws, edicts, fatwas must be ostracized because their actions only add to the utter confusion and ignorance pervading the Muslim world.
Surely, the destruction the Tsunami brought to South Asia is a sign of Allah’s displeasure with the Muslim people, along with Christians, Hindus and others. If we continue down the path of primitive worship of myths and rituals, surely Allah has even greater destruction planned for those without eyes, ears, the deaf, dumb and blind. After Allah has blessed us with light, how can we yet walk in darkness? How can we possess “supreme wisdom” yet have nothing, behave as spiritual slaves to any storefront imam with a rote memory of Al-Qur’an?
Let a Martin Luther Muslim arise to destroy idols of ignorance and suppression of creativity. Yes, let everything praise Allah, from the flute to the lute, from the dancer to the poet.
Marvin X is a distinguished poet, playwright and essayist of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). He is the founder and director of Recovery Theatre in San Francisco. He also co-founded the Black Arts/West Theatre and Black House, which served briefly as the headquarters for the Black Panther Party and as a center for performance, theatre, poetry and music in the Bay Area. Marvin X continues to work as a lecturer, teacher and producer.
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African Liberation Day - “Breaking The Chains; Waking Up the African in ...
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AFRICAN LIBERATION DAY 2017 Oakland,CA
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hapi b day sun ra, may 22. Sun Ra Arkestra - Face the Music / Space is the Place
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cornel west--fire of a new generation
Cornel West: The Fire of a New Generation
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
This is the 15th in a series of interviews on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week’s discussion is with Cornel West, one of the most prominent and provocative intellectuals in public life. He is a professor of philosophy and Christian practice at Union Theological Seminary and professor emeritus at Princeton University. He is the author and editor of more than 30 books, including “Black Prophetic Fire” and “The Radical King.” — George Yancy
George Yancy: Recently, on Aug. 10, you were arrested along with others outside the courthouse in St. Louis because of the collective resistance against continued racial injustice and police brutality. What was the political atmosphere like there?
Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul that one can no longer tolerate when one is pushed against a wall.
Cornel West: The black prophetic fire among the younger generation in Ferguson was intense and wonderful. Ferguson is ground zero for the struggle against police brutality and police murder. I just wanted to be a small part of that collective fight back that puts one’s body on the line. It was beautiful because part of the crowd was chanting, “This is what democracy looks like,” which echoes W.E.B. DuBois and the older generation’s critique of capitalist civilization and imperialist power. And you also had people chanting, “We gon’ be alright,” which is from rap artist Kendrick Lamar, who is concerned with the black body, decrepit schools, indecent housing. This chant is in many ways emerging as a kind of anthem of the movement for the younger generation. So, we had both the old school and the new school and I try to be a kind of link between these two schools. There was a polyphonic, antiphonal, call and response, all the way down and all the way live.
G.Y.: One of your newest books is entitled “Black Prophetic Fire.” Define what you mean by “black prophetic fire.”
C.W.: Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.
I think in many ways we have to begin with the younger generation, the generation of Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island and Oakland. There is not just a rekindling, but a re-invigoration taking place among the younger generation that enacts and enables prophetic fire. We’ve been in an ice age. If you go from the 1960s and 1970s — that’s my generation. But there was also an ice age called the neoliberal epoch, an ice age where it was no longer a beautiful thing to be on fire. It was a beautiful thing to have money. It was a beautiful thing to have status. It was a beautiful thing to have public reputation without a whole lot of commitment to social justice, whereas the younger generation is now catching the fire of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s.
G.Y.: When I think of black prophetic fire, I think of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Martin L. King, James Baldwin and so many more. In recent weeks, some have favorably compared the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates to Baldwin. I know that you publicly criticized this comparison. What was the nature of your critique?
C.W.: In a phone conversation I had with Brother Coates not long ago, I told him that the black prophetic tradition is the collective fightback of sustained compassion in the face of sustained catastrophe. It has the highest standards of excellence, and we all fall short. So a passionate defense of Baldwin — or John Coltrane or Toni Morrison — is crucial in this age of Ferguson.
G.Y.: In what ways do you think the concept of black prophetic fire speaks to — or ought to speak to — events like the tragic murder of nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.?
I’m an old Coltrane disciple just like I’m a Christian. You can be full of fire, but that fire has to be lit by a deep love of the people.
C.W.: Charleston is part and parcel of the ugly manifestation of the vicious legacy of white supremacy, and the younger generation — who have been wrestling with arbitrary police power, arbitrary corporate power, gentrification, the land-grabbing, the power-grabbing in and of the black community, and arbitrary cultural power in terms of white supremacist stereotypes promoted on television, radio and so forth — has become what I call the “marvelous new militancy,” and they embody this prophetic fire. The beautiful thing is that this “marvelous new militancy” is true for vanilla brothers and sisters, it’s true for all colors in the younger generation, though it is disproportionately black, disproportionately women and, significantly, disproportionately black, queer women.
G.Y.: Why the metaphor of “fire”?
C.W.: That’s just my tradition, brother. Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul that one can no longer tolerate when one is pushed against a wall. So, you straighten your back up, you take your stand, you speak your truth, you bear your witness and, most important, you are willing to live and die. Fire is very much about fruits as opposed to foliage. The ice age was all about foliage: “Look at me, look at me.” It was the peacock syndrome. Fire is about fruits, which is biblical, but also Marxist. It’s about praxis and what kind of life you live, what kind of costs you’re willing to bear, what kind of price you’re willing to pay, what kind of death you’re willing to embrace.
That was a great insight that Marcus Garvey had. Remember, Garvey often began his rallies with a black man or woman carrying a sign that read, “The Negro is not afraid.” Once you break the back of fear, you’re on fire. You need that fire. Even if that Negro carrying that sign is still shaking, the way that the lyrical genius Kanye West was shaking when he talked about George W. Bush not caring about black people, you’re still trying to overcome that fear, work through that fear.
The problem is that during the neoliberal epoch and during the ice age you’ve got the process of “niggerization,” which is designed to keep black people afraid. Keep them scared. Keep them intimidated. Keep them bowing and scraping. And Malcolm X understood this better than anybody, other than Ida B. Wells — they represented two of the highest moments of black prophetic fire in the 20th century. Ida, with a bounty on her head, was still full of fire. And Malcolm, we don’t even have a language for his fire.
G.Y.: Does this process of “niggerization” in American culture partly involve white supremacist myths being internalized by black people?
C.W.: Yes. When you teach black people that they are less beautiful, less moral, less intelligent, and as a result you defer to the white supremacist status quo, you rationalize your accommodation to the status quo, you lose your fire, you become much more tied to producing foliage, what appears to be the case. And, of course, in late capitalist culture, the culture of superficial spectacle, driven by capital, driven by money, driven by the market, it’s all about image and interest, anyway. In other words, principle drops out. Any conception of being a person of integrity is laughed at because what is central is image, what is central is interest. And, of course, interest is tied to money, and image is tied to the peacock projection, of what you appear to be.
When you teach black people they are less beautiful, less moral, less intelligent, you defer to the white supremacist status quo.
G.Y.: Can we assume then that you then would emphasize a form of education that would critique a certain kind of hyperrealism that is obsessed with images and nonmarket values?
C.W.: That’s right; absolutely. It’s the kind of thing that my dear brother Henry Giroux talks about with such insight. He’s written many books providing such a powerful critique of neoliberal market models of education. Stanley Aronowitz, of course, goes right along with Giroux’s critique in that regard. The notion has to do precisely with that critical consciousness that the great Paulo Freire talks about, or the great Myles Horton talked about, or the great bell hooks talks about in her works. How do you generate that kind of courageous critical consciousness that cuts against the grain and that discloses the operations of market interests and images, capitalist forms of wealth inequality, massive surveillance, imperial policies, drones dropping bombs on innocent people, ecological catastrophe and escalating nuclear catastrophe?
All of these various issues are very much tied into a kind of market model of education that reinforces the capitalist civilization, one that is more and more obsessed with just interest and image.
G.Y.: What do you see as the foremost challenge in creating a common cause between past generation and the current generation now “catching fire,” as you put it?
C.W.: For me, it is the dialectical interplay between the old school and prophetic thought and action. I’m an old Coltrane disciple just like I’m a Christian. You can be full of fire, but that fire has to be lit by a deep love of the people. And if that love is not in it, then the fire actually becomes just a sounding brass and tinkling cymbal that doesn’t get at the real moral substance and spiritual content that keeps anybody going, but especially people who have been hated for so long and in so many ways, as black people have.
For me, the love ethic is at the very center of it. It can be the love ethic of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Marvin Gaye, John Coltrane or Curtis Mayfield, but it has to have that central focus on loving the people. And when you love people, you hate the fact that they’re being treated unfairly. You tell the truth. You sacrifice your popularity for integrity. There is a willingness to give your life back to the people given that, in the end, they basically gave it to you, because we are who we are because somebody loved us anyway.
G.Y.: This idea relates to the collection of Dr. King’s writings you edited, called “The Radical King.” Why did you undertake the job of curating and editing the book?
C.W.: Because Martin had been so sanitized and sterilized. He has been so Santa Claus-ified, turned into an old man with a smile, toys in his bag to give out, and leaving everybody feeling so good. It was like we were living in Disneyland rather than in the nightmare that the present-day America is for so many poor working people, especially poor black working people. So, we needed a kind of crystallization.
But there has been a variety of different voices talking about the radical King. You know my closest friend in the world, James Melvin Washington, was one of the very few people that the King family allowed to bring the collection of sermons and writings together. It’s one of the greatest honors for me to be one of the first people that the King family allowed to bring those kinds of writings together across the board, laying out a framework. You’ve got James Melvin Washington’s “A Testament of Hope.” You’ve got other wonderful scholars like James Cone, Lewis Baldwin and others who have done magnificent work in their own way. But, you know, as I pass off the stage of space and time, I want to be able to leave these love letters to the younger generation. I want to tell them that they’re part of a great tradition, a grand tradition of struggle, critical, intellectual struggle, of moral and political struggle, and a spiritual struggle in music and the arts, and so on.
Contrary to when people talk about King every January, there is in “The Radical King” in fact a particular understanding of this moral titan, spiritual giant and great crusader for justice. So you get a sense of who he really was beyond all of the sanitizing and sterilizing that are trotted out every year in celebration of him. I consider it the most important book I’ve ever done.
G.Y.: King is well known for quoting the American reformer and abolitionist Theodore Parker’s words, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What’s your assessment of King’s claim now, in 2015, particularly in the light of the kind of existential plight and angst that black people and poor people are experiencing? Is there an arc of the moral universe?
C.W.: I think King had a very thick metaphysics when it came to history being the canvas upon which God was in full control. As you know, I don’t have such a thick metaphysics. I am closer to Anton Chekhov, Samuel Beckett and a bluesman. I think that King at the end of his life became more of a bluesman. He began to think: “Lord, have mercy. That arc might be bending, but it sure is bending the wrong way.” After all, he’s dealing with white supremacist backlash, patriarchal backlash and capitalist backlash against working people and the possibility of ecological catastrophe. He was already wrestling with the possible non-existence of life on the earth in terms of the nuclear catastrophe that we were on the brink of. So, he made a leap of faith grounded in a certain conception of history that was heading toward justice. I don’t accept that. I just do it because it’s right. I do it because integrity, honesty and decency are in and of themselves enough reward that I’d rather go under, trying to do what’s right, even if it has no chance at all.
G.Y.: I was thinking about your existentialist sensibilities that would in fact be critical of the claim that the universe is moral at all. Yet, both you and King share a blues sensibility that places emphasis on touching the pain and yet transcending the pain, and also the importance of the Christian good news.
C.W.: Oh, absolutely, we are both very similar in terms of never allowing hatred to have the last word, not allowing despair to have the last word, telling the truth about structures of domination of various sorts, keeping track of the variety of forms of oppression so we don’t become ghettoized and tied to just one single issue. Yet, at the same time, we’re trying to sustain hope by being a hope. Hope is not simply something that you have; hope is something that you are. So, when Curtis Mayfield says “keep on pushing,” that’s not an abstract conception about optimism in the world. That is an imperative to be a hope for others in the way Christians in the past used to be a blessing — not the idea of praying for a blessings, but being a blessing.
John Coltrane says be a force for good. Don’t just talk about forces for good, be a force. So it’s an ontological state. So, in the end, all we have is who we are. If you end up being cowardly, then you end up losing the best of your world, or your society, or your community, or yourself. If you’re courageous, you protect, try and preserve the best of it. Now, you might preserve the best, and still not be good enough to triumph over evil. Hey, that’s the way it is. You did the best you could do. T.S. Eliot says, “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” T.S. Eliot was a right-wing brother who was full of wisdom. All you can do is to try; keep on pushing. That’s all you can do.
G.Y.: When it comes to race in America in 2015, what is to be done?
C.W.: Well, the first thing, of course, is you’ve got to shatter denial, avoidance and evasion. That’s part of my criticism of the president. For seven years, he just hasn’t or refused to hit it head-on. It looks like he’s now beginning to find his voice. But in finding his voice, it’s either too late or he’s lost his moral authority. He can’t drop drones on hundreds of innocent children and then talk about how upset he is when innocent people are killed. You can’t reshape the world in the image of corporate interest and image with Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and then say that you’re in deep solidarity with working people and poor people. You can’t engage in massive surveillance, keeping track of phone calls across the board, targeting Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning and others, and then turn right back around and say you’re against secrecy, you’re against clandestine policy.
So that, unfortunately, if he had come right in and asserted his moral authority over against Fox News, over against right-wing, conservative folk who were coming at him — even if he lost — he would have let the world know what his deep moral convictions are. But he came in as a Machiavellian. He came in with political calculation. That’s why he brought in Machiavellians like Rahm Emanuel and Larry Summers, and others. So, it was clear it was going to be political calculation, not moral conviction.
How can anyone take your word seriously after seven years about how we need to put a spotlight on racism when, for seven years, you’ve been engaged in political calculation about racism? But then you send out your lieutenants. You send out all your Obama cheerleaders and bootlickers and they say to his critics that he is president of all of America, not black America. And we say white supremacy is a matter of truth. Are you interested in truth? It’s a matter of justice. Are you interested in justice? It’s a matter of national security. Are you interested in national security? Well, we talk about black America. We’re not talking about some ghettoized group that’s just an interest group that you have to engage in political calculation about. When you talk about black people, you’re talking about wrestling with lies and injustice coming at them and their quest for truth and justice. If you’re not interested in truth and justice, no politician ought to be in office, and not just the president. So, we’ve actually had a major setback in seven years; a lost opportunity.
G.Y.: But is it really possible to speak courageous speech while acting as the most powerful country in the world? Of course, we also have to admit the history of racism preceded Obama’s tenure and will exceed it. My point is that there is a deep tension that exists for someone who desires to embody prophetic fire and yet be in charge of an empire.
C.W.: I think that’s true for most politicians, actually. Now when it comes to the intellectuals who rationalize their deference to the politician, so they want to pose as prophetic even though they are very much deferential to the powers that be, they need to be criticized in a very intense way. That’s why I’m very hard on the Obama cheerleaders, you see, but when it comes to the politicians themselves, it is very difficult to be a prophetic politician the way in which Harold Washington was or the way Paul Wellstone was or the way Shirley Chisholm was, or the way my dear brother Bernie Sanders actually is. He is a prophetic politician. He speaks the truth about wealth and equality. He speaks the truth about Wall Street. He speaks the truth about working and poor people being afterthoughts in terms of the kind of calculations of the oligarchs of our day. He shows that it’s possible to be a politician who speaks the truth.
Once you occupy the White House, you are head of the empire. Then you have a choice. We’ve had two grand candidates in the history of the United States. We’ve had Abraham Lincoln and we’ve had Franklin D. Roosevelt. Both of them are full of flaws, full of faults, full of many, many blind spots. But they pushed the American experiment in a progressive way, even given their faults. And that’s what we thought Obama was going to do. We were looking for Lincoln, and we got another Clinton, and that is in no way satisfying.
That’s what I mean by, we were looking for a Coltrane and we ended up getting a Kenny G. You can’t help but be profoundly disappointed. But also ready for more fightback in post-Obama America!
This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series (with Linda Martin Alcoff, Judith Butler, Noam Chomsky, Charles Mills, Falguni A. Sheth and others) can be found here.
George Yancy is a professor of philosophy at Emory University. He has written, edited and co-edited numerous books, including “Black Bodies, White Gazes,” “Look, a White!” and “Pursuing Trayvon Martin,” co-edited with Janine Jones.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and on Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
Correction: August 20, 2015
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the first black woman in the United States Congress. It is Shirley Chisholm, not Chisolm. It also included an inaccurate claim by the interviewee, Cornel West, that only he and one other scholar had been given permission by the family of Martin Luther King to collect and publish Reverend King's writings. At least one other scholar, Clayborne Carson of Stanford University has been given such access.
An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the first black woman in the United States Congress. It is Shirley Chisholm, not Chisolm. It also included an inaccurate claim by the interviewee, Cornel West, that only he and one other scholar had been given permission by the family of Martin Luther King to collect and publish Reverend King's writings. At least one other scholar, Clayborne Carson of Stanford University has been given such access.
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History of US interventions around the world
US Military and Clandestine Operations in Foreign Countries - 1798-Present
Global Policy ForumDecember 2005
Note: This list does not pretend to be definitive or absolutely complete. Nor does it seek to explain or interpret the interventions. Information and interpretation on selected interventions will be later included as links. Note that US operations in World Wars I and II have been excluded.
| 1798-1800 | France | Undeclared naval war against France, marines land in Puerto Plata. |
| 1801-1805 | Tripoli | War with Tripoli (Libya), called "First Barbary War". |
| 1806 | Spanish Mexico | Military force enters Spanish territory in headwaters of the Rio Grande. |
| 1806-1810 | Spanish and French in Caribbean | US naval vessels attack French and Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. |
| 1810 | Spanish West Florida | Troops invade and seize Western Florida, a Spanish possession. |
| 1812 | Spanish East Florida | Troops seize Amelia Island and adjacent territories. |
| 1812 | Britain | War of 1812, includes naval and land operations. |
| 1813 | Marquesas Island | Forces seize Nukahiva and establish first US naval base in the Pacific. |
| 1814 | Spanish (East Florida) | Troops seize Pensacola in Spanish East Florida. |
| 1814-1825 | French, British and Spanish in Caribbean | US naval squadron engages French, British and Spanish shipping in the Caribbean. |
| 1815 | Algiers and Tripoli | US naval fleet under Captain Stephen Decatur wages "Second Barbary War" in North Africa. |
| 1816-1819 | Spanish East Florida | Troops attack and seize Nicholls' Fort, Amelia Island and other strategic locations. Spain eventually cedes East Florida to the US. |
| 1822-1825 | Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico | Marines land in numerous cities in the Spanish island of Cuba and also in Spanish Puerto Rico. |
| 1827 | Greece | Marines invade the Greek islands of Argentiere, Miconi and Andross. |
| 1831 | Falkland/Malvinas Islands | US naval squadrons aggress the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. |
| 1832 | Sumatra, Dutch East Indies | US naval squadrons attack Qallah Battoo. |
| 1833 | Argentina | Forces land in Buenos Aires and engage local combatants. |
| 1835-1836 | Peru | Troops dispatched twice for counter-insurgency operations. |
| 1836 | Mexico | Troops assist Texas war for independence. |
| 1837 | Canada | Naval incident on the Canadian border leads to mobilization of a large force to invade Canada. War is narrowly averted. |
| 1838 | Sumatra, Dutch East Indies | US naval forces sent to Sumatra for punitive expedition. |
| 1840-1841 | Fiji | Naval forces deployed, marines land. |
| 1841 | Samoa | Naval forces deployed, marines land. |
| 1842 | Mexico | Naval forces temporarily seize cities of Monterey and San Diego. |
| 1843 | China | Marines land in Canton. |
| 1843 | Ivory Coast | Marines land. |
| 1846-1848 | Mexico | Full-scale war. Mexico cedes half of its territory to the US by the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo. |
| 1849 | Ottoman Empire (Turkey) | Naval force dispatched to Smyrna. |
| 1852-1853 | Argentina | Marines land in Buenos Aires. |
| 1854 | Nicaragua | Navy bombards and largely destroys city of San Juan del Norte. Marines land and set fire to the city. |
| 1854 | Japan | Commodore Perry and his fleet deploy at Yokohama. |
| 1855 | Uruguay | Marines land in Montevideo. |
| 1856 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Marines land for counter-insurgency campaign. |
| 1856 | China | Marines deployed in Canton. |
| 1856 | Hawaii | Naval forces seize small islands of Jarvis, Baker and Howland in the Hawaiian Islands. |
| 1857 | Nicaragua | Marines land. |
| 1858 | Uruguay | Marines land in Montevideo. |
| 1858 | Fiji | Marines land. |
| 1859 | Paraguay | Large naval force deployed. |
| 1859 | China | Troops enter Shanghai. |
| 1859 | Mexico | Military force enters northern area. |
| 1860 | Portuguese West Africa | Troops land at Kissembo. |
| 1860 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Troops and naval forces deployed. |
| 1863 | Japan | Troops land at Shimonoseki. |
| 1864 | Japan | Troops landed in Yedo. |
| 1865 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Marines landed. |
| 1866 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Troops invade and seize Matamoros, later withdraw. |
| 1866 | China | Marines land in Newchwang. |
| 1867 | Nicaragua | Marines land in Managua and Leon in Nicaragua. |
| 1867 | Formosa Island (Taiwan) | Marines land. |
| 1867 | Midway Island | Naval forces seize this island in the Hawaiian Archipelago for a naval base. |
| 1868 | Japan | Naval forces deployed at Osaka, Hiogo, Nagasaki, Yokohama and Negata. |
| 1868 | Uruguay | Marines land at Montevideo. |
| 1870 | Colombia | Marines landed. |
| 1871 | Korea | Forces landed. |
| 1873 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Marines landed. |
| 1874 | Hawaii | Sailors and marines landed. |
| 1876 | Mexico | Army again occupies Matamoros. |
| 1882 | British Egypt | Troops land. |
| 1885 | Colombia (Panama Region) | Troops land in Colon and Panama City. |
| 1885 | Samoa | Naval force deployed. |
| 1887 | Hawaii | Navy gains right to build permanent naval base at Pearl Harbor. |
| 1888 | Haiti | Troops landed. |
| 1888 | Samoa | Marines landed. |
| 1889 | Samoa | Clash with German naval forces. |
| 1890 | Argentina | US sailors land in Buenos Aires. |
| 1891 | Chile | US sailors land in the major port city of Valparaiso. |
| 1891 | Haiti | Marines land on US-claimed Navassa Island. |
| 1893 | Hawaii | Marines and other naval forces land and overthrow the monarchy. Read More | President Cleveland's Message |
| 1894 | Nicaragua | Marines land at Bluefields on the eastern coast. |
| 1894-1895 | China | Marines are stationed at Tientsin and Beijing. A naval ship takes up position at Newchwang. |
| 1894-1896 | Korea | Marines land and remain in Seoul. |
| 1895 | Colombia | Marines are sent to the town Bocas del Toro. |
| 1896 | Nicaragua | Marines land in the port of Corinto. |
| 1898 | Nicaragua | Marines land at the port city of San Juan del Sur. |
| 1898 | Guam | Naval forces seize Guam Island from Spain and the US holds the island permanently. |
| 1898 | Cuba | Naval and land forces seize Cuba from Spain. |
| 1898 | Puerto Rico | Naval and land forces seize Puerto Rico from Spain and the US holds the island permanently. |
| 1898 | Philippines | Naval forces defeat the Spanish fleet and the US takes control of the country. |
| 1899 | Philippines | Military units are reinforced for extensive counter-insurgency operations. |
| 1899 | Samoa | Naval forces land |
| 1899 | Nicaragua | Marines land at the port city of Bluefields. |
| 1900 | China | US forces intervene in several cities. |
| 1901 | Colombia/Panama | Marines land. |
| 1902 | Colombia/Panama | US forces land in Bocas de Toro |
| 1903 | Colombia/Panama | With US backing, a group in northern Colombia declares independence as the state of Panama |
| 1903 | Guam | Navy begins development in Apra Harbor of a permanent base installation. |
| 1903 | Honduras | Marines go ashore at Puerto Cortez. |
| 1903 | Dominican Republic | Marines land in Santo Domingo. |
| 1904-1905 | Korea | Marines land and stay in Seoul. |
| 1906-1909 | Cuba | Marines land. The US builds a major naval base at Guantanamo Bay. |
| 1907 | Nicaragua | Troops seize major centers. |
| 1907 | Honduras | Marines land and take up garrison in cities of Trujillo, Ceiba, Puerto Cortez, San Pedro, Laguna and Choloma. |
| 1908 | Panama | Marines land and carry out operations. |
| 1910 | Nicaragua | Marines land in Bluefields and Corinto. |
| 1911 | Honduras | Marines intervene. |
| 1911-1941 | China | The US builds up its military presence in the country to a force of 5000 troops and a fleet of 44 vessels patrolling China's coast and rivers. |
| 1912 | Cuba | US sends army troops into combat in Havana. |
| 1912 | Panama | Army troops intervene. |
| 1912 | Honduras | Marines land. |
| 1912-1933 | Nicaragua | Marines intervene. A 20-year occupation of the country follows. |
| 1913 | Mexico | Marines land at Ciaris Estero. |
| 1914 | Dominican Republic | Naval forces engage in battles in the city of Santo Domingo. |
| 1914 | Mexico | US forces seize and occupy Mexico's major port city of Veracrus from April through November. |
| 1915-1916 | Mexico | An expeditionary force of the US Army under Gen. John J. Pershing crosses the Texas border and penetrates several hundred miles into Mexican territory. Eventually reinforced to over 11,000 officers and men. |
| 1914-1934 | Haiti | Troops land, aerial bombardment leading to a 19-year military occupation. |
| 1916-1924 | Dominican Republic | Military intervention leading to 8-year occupation. |
| 1917-1933 | Cuba | Landing of naval forces. Beginning of a 15-year occupation. |
| 1918-1920 | Panama | Troops intervene, remain on "police duty" for over 2 years. |
| 1918-1922 | Russia | Naval forces and army troops fight battles in several areas of the country during a five- year period. |
| 1919 | Yugoslavia | Marines intervene in Dalmatia. |
| 1919 | Honduras | Marines land. |
| 1920 | Guatemala | Troops intervene. |
| 1922 | Turkey | Marines engaged in operations in Smyrna (Izmir). |
| 1922-1927 | China | Naval forces and troops deployed during 5-year period. |
| 1924-1925 | Honduras | Troops land twice in two-year period. |
| 1925 | Panama | Marines land and engage in operations. |
| 1927-1934 | China | Marines and naval forces stationed throughout the country. |
| 1932 | El Salvador | Naval forces intervene. |
| 1933 | Cuba | Naval forces deployed. |
| 1934 | China | Marines land in Foochow. |
| 1946 | Iran | Troops deployed in northern province. |
| 1946-1949 | China | Major US army presence of about 100,000 troops, fighting, training and advising local combatants. |
| 1947-1949 | Greece | US forces wage a 3-year counterinsurgency campaign. |
| 1948 | Italy | Heavy CIA involvement in national elections. |
| 1948-1954 | Philippines | Commando operations, "secret" CIA war. |
| 1950-1953 | Korea | Major forces engaged in war in Korean peninsula. |
| 1953 | Iran | CIA overthrows government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh. Read More |
| 1954 | Vietnam | Financial and materiel support for colonial French military operations, leads eventually to direct US military involvement. |
| 1954 | Guatemala | CIA overthrows the government of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. |
| 1958 | Lebanon | US marines and army units totaling 14,000 land. |
| 1958 | Panama | Clashes between US forces in Canal Zone and local citizens. |
| 1959 | Haiti | Marines land. |
| 1960 | Congo | CIA-backed overthrow and assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. |
| 1960-1964 | Vietnam | Gradual introduction of military advisors and special forces. |
| 1961 | Cuba | CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion. |
| 1962 | Cuba | Nuclear threat and naval blockade. |
| 1962 | Laos | CIA-backed military coup. |
| 1963 | Ecuador | CIA backs military overthrow of President Jose Maria Valesco Ibarra. |
| 1964 | Panama | Clashes between US forces in Canal Zone and local citizens. |
| 1964 | Brazil | CIA-backed military coup overthrows the government of Joao Goulart and Gen. Castello Branco takes power. Read More |
| 1965-1975 | Vietnam | Large commitment of military forces, including air, naval and ground units numbering up to 500,000+ troops. Full-scale war, lasting for ten years. |
| 1965 | Indonesia | CIA-backed army coup overthrows President Sukarno and brings Gen. Suharto to power. |
| 1965 | Congo | CIA backed military coup overthrows President Joseph Kasavubu and brings Joseph Mobutu to power. |
| 1965 | Dominican Republic | 23,000 troops land. |
| 1965-1973 | Laos | Bombing campaign begin, lasting eight years. |
| 1966 | Ghana | CIA-backed military coup ousts President Kwame Nkrumah. |
| 1966-1967 | Guatemala | Extensive counter-insurgency operation. |
| 1969-1975 | Cambodia | CIA supports military coup against Prince Sihanouk, bringing Lon Nol to power. Intensive bombing for seven years along border with Vietnam. |
| 1970 | Oman | Counter-insurgency operation, including coordination with Iranian marine invasion. |
| 1971-1973 | Laos | Invasion by US and South Vietnames forces. |
| 1973 | Chile | CIA-backed military coup ousts government of President Salvador Allende. Gen. Augusto Pinochet comes to power. |
| 1975 | Cambodia | Marines land, engage in combat with government forces. |
| 1976-1992 | Angola | Military and CIA operations. |
| 1980 | Iran | Special operations units land in Iranian desert. Helicopter malfunction leads to aborting of planned raid. |
| 1981 | Libya | Naval jets shoot down two Libyan jets in maneuvers over the Mediterranean. |
| 1981-1992 | El Salvador | CIA and special forces begin a long counterinsurgency campaign. |
| 1981-1990 | Nicaragua | CIA directs exile "Contra" operations. US air units drop sea mines in harbors. |
| 1982-1984 | Lebanon | Marines land and naval forces fire on local combatants. |
| 1983 | Grenada | Military forces invade Grenada. |
| 1983-1989 | Honduras | Large program of military assistance aimed at conflict in Nicaragua. |
| 1984 | Iran | Two Iranian jets shot down over the Persian Gulf. |
| 1986 | Libya | US aircraft bomb the cities of Tripoli and Benghazi, including direct strikes at the official residence of President Muamar al Qadaffi. |
| 1986 | Bolivia | Special Forces units engage in counter-insurgency. |
| 1987-1988 | Iran | Naval forces block Iranian shipping. Civilian airliner shot down by missile cruiser. |
| 1989 | Libya | Naval aircraft shoot down two Libyan jets over Gulf of Sidra. |
| 1989 | Philippines | CIA and Special Forces involved in counterinsurgency. |
| 1989-1990 | Panama | 27,000 troops as well as naval and air power used to overthrow government of President Noriega. |
| 1990 | Liberia | Troops deployed. |
| 1990-1991 | Iraq | Major military operation, including naval blockade, air strikes; large number of troops attack Iraqi forces in occupied Kuwait. |
| 1991-2003 | Iraq | Control of Iraqi airspace in north and south of the country with periodic attacks on air and ground targets. |
| 1991 | Haiti | CIA-backed military coup ousts President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. |
| 1992-1994 | Somalia | Special operations forces intervene. |
| 1992-1994 | Yugoslavia | Major role in NATO blockade of Serbia and Montenegro. |
| 1993-1995 | Bosnia | Active military involvement with air and ground forces. |
| 1994-1996 | Haiti | Troops depose military rulers and restore President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office. |
| 1995 | Croatia | Krajina Serb airfields attacked. |
| 1996-1997 | Zaire (Congo) | Marines involved in operations in eastern region of the country. |
| 1997 | Liberia | Troops deployed. |
| 1998 | Sudan | Air strikes destroy country's major pharmaceutical plant. |
| 1998 | Afghanistan | Attack on targets in the country. |
| 1998 | Iraq | Four days of intensive air and missile strikes. |
| 1999 | Yugoslavia | Major involvement in NATO air strikes. |
| 2001 | Macedonia | NATO troops shift and partially disarm Albanian rebels. |
| 2001 | Afghanistan | Air attacks and ground operations oust Taliban government and install a new regime. |
| 2003 | Iraq | Invasion with large ground, air and naval forces ousts government of Saddam Hussein and establishes new government. |
| 2003-present | Iraq | Occupation force of 150,000 troops in protracted counter-insurgency war |
| 2004 | Haiti | Marines land. CIA-backed forces overthrow President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. |
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US interference in elections around the world in 45 countries
POLITICS
Election Interference? The U.S. Has Done It In 45 Countries Worldwide
America has a long history of meddling in the elections of foreign countries, new research shows
Illustration: Diana Quach
Russia’s attempt to sway the 2016 election continues to consume American politics as the Obama administration struck back with a series of punishments targeting Russia’s spy agencies and diplomats. The White House on Thursday moved to expel 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives from the U.S. and impose sanctions on the Kremlin’s two leading intelligence services in response for what the U.S. says were a series of cyberattacks conducted by Russia during the presidential campaign. For the time being, Russian President Vladamir Putin has indicated that he won’t immediately retaliate, though that could change.
The simmering tit for tat has kept the issue of election meddling burning bright in the national spotlight, fueled even further by the belief among U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia wanted to help Donald Trump capture the presidency. Yet neither country is a stranger when it comes to directly trying to sway the election of other nations. In fact, the U.S. has a long and stunning history of attempting to influence foreign presidential elections, recent research by political scientist Dov Levin shows.
Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie-Mellon University, found that the U.S. attempted to influence the elections of foreign countries as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000. Often covert in their execution, these efforts included everything from CIA operatives running successful presidential campaigns in the Philippines during the 1950s to leaking damaging information on Marxist Sandanistas in order to sway Nicaraguan voters in 1990. All told, the U.S. allegedly targeted the elections of 45 nations across the globe during this period, Levin’s research shows. In the case of some countries, such as Italy and Japan, the U.S. attempted to intervene in four or more separate elections.
Levin’s figures do not include military coups or regime change attempts following the election of a candidate the U.S. opposed, such as when the CIA helped overthrow Mohammad Mosaddeq, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, in 1953. He defines an electoral intervention as “a costly act which is designed to determine the election results [in favor of] one of the two sides.” According to Levin’s research, that includes: peddling misinformation or propaganda; creating campaign material for preferred candidates or parties; providing or withdrawing foreign aid, and; making public announcements that threaten or favor certain candidates. Often, it also includes the U.S. covertly delivering large sums of cash, as was the case in elections in Japan, Lebanon, Italy, and other countries.
To build his database, Levin says he relied on declassified U.S. intelligence as well as a number of Congressional reports on CIA activity. He also combed through what he considered reliable histories of the CIA and covert American activity, as well as academic research on U.S. intelligence, diplomatic histories of the Cold War, and memoirs of former CIA officials. Much of America’s meddling in foreign elections has been well-documented — Chile in the 1960s, Haiti in the 1990s. But Malta in 1971? According to Levin’s study, the U.S. attempted to “goose” the tiny Mediterranean island’s economy in the months leading up to its election that year.
Much of the America’s electoral meddling occurred throughout the Cold War as a response to containing Soviet influence through the spread of supposed leftist proxies, the findings suggest. And to be clear, the U.S. wasn’t the only one trying to sway foreign elections. By Levin’s count, Russia attempted to interfere in other countries’ elections 36 times between the end of World War II and the end of the 20th century, bringing the total number of electoral interventions by the two countries to 117 during that period.
Yet even after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S. continued its interventions abroad, including elections in Israel, former Czechoslovakia, and even Russia in 1996, Levin found. Since 2000, the U.S. has attempted to sway elections in Ukraine, Kenya, Lebanon, and Afghanistan, among others.
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africans rising
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marvin x on youtube
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bio marvin x wikipedia, b may 29, 1944--
Born Marvin Ellis Jackmon in Fowler, California, he also has taken the Muslim name El Muhajir. His work has been associated with the Black Arts/Black Aesthetics Movement of the 1960s.
Family life[edit]
He grew up in Fresno and Oakland, in an activist household. He graduated from Thomas Alva Edison High School in Fresno in 1962. His parents published the Black-owned paper of Fresno, California, called the Fresno Voice.[1] The 1947 paper advertised community events, local businesses, including their own real-estate business, and focused on national and state events including: the promotion of anti-lynching laws, Jackie Robinson Day, New York Freedom trains being integrated, the mission work of the Catholic church with Indian and Negroes, and the $350 million expansion of PG&E in California.
Marvin X has four living children and one son who transitioned at 39..
Black Arts Movement[edit]
Because of X's affiliations with Black Panther activists of the day (Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver) and his work in Black theater with Ed Bullins, X is considered one of the major essayists and playwrights of the Black Aesthetics Movement.[2]
He attended Merritt College, where he met Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, and received his BA and MA in English from San Francisco State University.[3]
X has taught at San Francisco State University, Fresno State University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Mills College, Merritt College, Laney College, the University of Nevada at Reno and Reedley Community College. He has lectured nationally at colleges and universities including the University of Arkansas, the University of Houston, Morehouse and Spelman Colleges, the University of Virginia, Howard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, Fresno City College, Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, NYU and UMass Boston.
X attended Oakland City College (Merritt College), where he was introduced to Black Nationalism and became friends with future Black Panther founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale. X earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from San Francisco State University and emerged as an important voice in the Black Arts Movement (BAM), the artistic arm of the Black Power movement, in the mid-to-late '60s. He wrote for many of the BAM's key journals. He also co-founded, with playwright Ed Bullins and others, two of BAM's premier West Coast headquarters and venues — Oakland's Black House and San Francisco's Black Arts/West Theatre. In 1967, X joined the Nation of Islam and became known as El Muhajir. In the 1980s, he organized the Melvin Black Forum on Human Rights and the first Annual All Black Men's Conference. He also served as an aide to former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and created the short-lived Marvin X Center for the Study of World Religions. In 1999, he founded San Francisco's Recovery Theatre. His production of One Day in the Life, the play he wrote about his drug addiction and recovery, became the longest-running African-American drama in Northern California. In 2004, in celebration of Black History Month, he produced the San Francisco Tenderloin Book Fair (also known as the San Francisco Black Radical Book Fair) and University of Poetry. He has taught Black Studies, drama, creative writing, journalism, English and Arabic at a variety of California universities and colleges.
One of the movers and shakers of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), Marvin X has published 30 books, including essays, poems, plays, anthologies and his autobiography, Somethin’ Proper. Notable books include: Fly to Allah, poems, Beyond Religion, Toward Spirituality, essays on consciousness, and How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, a manual based on the 12-step Recovery model. In 2011 UC Berkeley Bancroft Library acquired the Marvin X papers. He continues to work as an activist, educator, writer, and producer.
Awards and honors[edit]
- Marvin X Day proclaimed by the City and County of San Francisco, 2001
- Life Member, California Scholarship Federation, Honor Society
- National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship, 1972
- National Endowment for the Humanities Planning Grants, 1979
References[edit]
External links[edit]
- Black Bird Press News & Review
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mohja kahf: she carries weapons; they are called words
SAN FRANCISCO, May 11 — Mohja Kahf, an Arab-American writer, draws sharp, funny, earthy portraits of the fault line separating Muslim women from their Western counterparts. At times she captures the breach in a single title, like her poem built around respecting prayer rituals, called “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears.”
Occasionally it just takes a few lines, as in “Hijab Scene #2,” a poem that reads in its entirety: “ ‘You people have such restrictive dress for women,’ she said, hobbling away in three inch heels and panty hose to finish out another pink-collar temp pool day.”
Sometimes it’s a whole book, particularly her novel published last year, “The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf,” a coming-of-age tale set in Indiana, where Ms. Kahf spent much of her own childhood. The novel turned Ms. Kahf into something of an idol among Muslim American women, especially younger ones, struggling to reconcile their faith with a country often hostile toward it.
“As a Muslim living in the U.S., you run into these little slices of life that are on every page of the book,” said Dina Ibrahim, a 31-year-old broadcasting professor, after Ms. Kahf read recently at the Arab Cultural and Community Center here.
For example, Ms. Ibrahim, whose parents are Egyptian, recently experienced the angst of trying to explain to a salesman at Home Depot that she wanted to install a hose in her toilet. Water hoses are ubiquitous in the Arab world, where such ablutions are considered far more sanitary than toilet paper.
Ms. Kahf, 39, is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas. She believes that the growing body of Muslim American literature has reached the critical mass where it might be considered its own genre, including works like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Khaled Hosseini’s novel “The Kite Runner” and a current best seller, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid.
The books evoke the mixture of pride and shame involved in being an “other,” with characters living the tug of war between assimilating and maintaining the habits of a good Muslim. “Islam makes you this other race,” Ms. Kahf told a literature class at Stanford University, noting that the genre should appeal to both American Muslims and outsiders seeking a better understanding of the minority. “I can’t not write ethnically, because my characters don’t eat pork and they do use incense.”
The knowledge that her work might be one window that outsiders use to view Muslim Americans sometimes shapes her choices as a writer, she explained. In an early draft of her novel, for example, its heroine, Khadra Shamy, changed from being a devout teenager wearing black head scarves to taking the veil off entirely as an adult. In later drafts Ms. Kahf changed her mind.
“People would have read it as ‘We won! She is an escaped Muslim woman!’ ” the author said. “People think that all Arab women are dying to uncover.”
She ultimately decided that Khadra would remain veiled, at least along the lines that Ms. Kahf is herself — she covers her hair for public appearances, but lets it slip off in restaurants and is less than scrupulous about it on hot days.
The book is rife with the lurking dangers that Muslims encounter in America. It details the fear and horror of a kindergarten girl discovering that candy cane contains “pig,” or Khadra’s frustration in middle school when the bullies tear off her head scarf repeatedly, and her teachers pretend not to notice.
Ms. Kahf came to this country in 1971 from Damascus, Syria, before her fourth birthday, and like her, many immigrant Muslim children find themselves caught between hostile worlds at school and parents who are basically clueless. Several young women at the San Francisco reading said that in growing up as the only Muslim girls in their communities, they wish they had had Ms. Kahf’s book to read so they knew that they were not alone.
Suzanne Shah, a 21-year-old premed student at the University of California, Berkeley, uses Ms. Kahf’s poetry book, “E-mails from Scheherazad,” in a class she helps tutor.
“It was refreshing for me to find that there is a poet out there who speaks the same language that I speak and thinks the same way I do,” Ms. Shah said.
Ms. Shah, who is unveiled, said she particularly likes a poem castigating those trying to make a battleground out of Muslim women’s hair, with Muslims treating the veil as far too sacred and Westerners misconstruing taking off the veil as liberation.
“It’s not war, it’s not freedom, it’s just hair,” said Ms. Shah, who points out to her students how Ms. Kahf is more observer than judge. In the poem about American women seeing her grandmother washing her feet before prayers, for example, Ms. Kahf writes, “They fluster about and flutter their hands, and I can see a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom.”
Not that Ms. Kahf entirely avoids choosing sides; her political poems can be searing. In “We Will Not Deny the Holocaust,” she lays out the common Arab perspective that Israel literally gets away with murder, using the Holocaust as a canopy to deflect criticism of widespread human rights abuses against the Palestinians.
Her father went into exile because he was a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, and her husband, Najib Ghadbian, a political science professor, is involved in Syrian exile politics. During a radio interview here, Ms. Kahf called on the Syrian government to release Anwar al-Bounni, a scrappy human rights lawyer just sentenced to five years in jail.
She believes the emphasis on tradition in the Arab world long ago warped the open spirit of Islam. Although Ms. Kahf grew up in a devout household, she finds the Muslim Brotherhood’s interpretation of Islam too narrow, calling it an anticolonial political movement that is just not spiritual enough to incorporate all facets of Islam.
That would include sex, and Ms. Kahf writes a rather graphic online sex column that has drawn ire, even a death threat, from the orthodox. One column described a dream in which a revered medieval Islamic scholar is described in flagrante delicto, while another depicts a Syrian village where the local imam has declared that women too can take more than one spouse.
Relations between the sexes is a subject she said she often used when asked to do readings to church groups around Arkansas. The women cannot always relate to stories about Muslim immigrant anxieties, she said, but she finds common ground with poetry talking about a man’s chest as “that forested mountain with the bluffs and crags where a woman likes to hide.”
In one poem about the holy fasting month of Ramadan, she laments that after abstaining from food and sex all day, then gorging at night, nobody is ever in the mood for lovemaking. “Ramadan is not a time for thongs” was a huge laugh line for her San Francisco audience.
Her readings are rather un-self-conscious. She waves her hands. She sings, she dances. In fact, she can sometimes seem almost oblivious to her surroundings. Driving across the Stanford campus, she stopped right in the middle of an intersection to light a clove cigarette.
Her audiences say Ms. Kahf embodies what they strive for, in that she is someone who both respects her own faith and yet uses the advantages offered by being an American, like free speech, to explore its every corner.
“It is just so refreshing for someone to put a lighter spin on being a Muslim in America,” said Ms. Ibrahim, the San Francisco professor. “Are we only going to talk about the war, are we only going to talk about how our faith is so misunderstood? It gets really old.”
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Psycho-linguistics and the Black Arts Movement
This document is in the National Museum of African American History and Culture,
Smithsonian, Wash. D.C.
Multi-cultural students perform his BAM classic Flowers the Trashman at UC Merced.
One cannot begin to comprehend the role psycho-linguistics played in the Black Arts Movement, sister of the Black Power Movement (Larry Neal), mother of the Black Power Movement (Marvin X), until one understand's the power of language that was critical in the mental liberation of brothers and sisters during the 60s and 70s. Language usage in the plays and poetry nullified any notion of obscenity and profanity. Instead, audiences were euphoric to hear such terms as motherfucker, bitch, nigguh, honky, devil and other words that ignited audiences and finally liberated them from the puritan speech of the petit-bourgeoisie. The BAM poets and playwrights took Black language to a new level of freedom. Amiri Baraka, aka LeRoi Jones set the tone with his play The Dutchman. Marvin X's poem Burn, Baby, Burn on the Watts Riot, 1965, was recited by Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale from Oakland to Harlem. Even before the BPP was born, a choice line from Marvin's poem said, "Motherfuck the police/and Parker's (Chief of the LAPD) sister too!" Because of the language in Marvin's play Flowers for the Trashman and Ed Bullin's It Has No Choice, their Black Arts West Theatre was invaded by the San Francisco Police Dept. When Flowers for the Trashman was performed at Oakland's Laney College, the OPD threatened to arrest the entire cast. Meanwhile, the UC Berkeley Free Speech Movement was in full swing but had no connection with the BAM.
Merritt College student Bobby Seale performed the lead role in Marvin's second play Come Next Summer, 1965, about a young black man finding himself then joining the revolution and recited his poem Burn, Baby Burn from Oakland to Harlem. Marvin X has never told Bobby he was in the audience in Harlem outside the Theresa Hotel at 7th Ave. and 125th, in 1968, when Bobby recited his poem.
Earlier, Flowers for the Trashman was performed at Oakland's Merritt College, invited by the Soul Students Advisory Council, aka BSU, Bobby Seale says, "After Marvin's play was performed, the student movement at Merritt College took off giving birth the Black Panther Party." It was the language that liberated students and inspired them to join the revolution. People realized they were indeed free to say anything and no longer proscribed by black bourgeoisie linguistics. The bourgeoisie was horrified but the black masses were liberated psycho-linguistically by the BAM languange.
As per the psycho-linguistics of Marvin X, Master Black literary critic James G. Spady says, "When you listen to Tupac Shakur, E-40, Too Short, Master P or any other rappers out of the Bay Area of Cali, think of Marvin X. He laid the foundation and gave us the language to express Black male urban experiences in a lyrical way."
Of course let us not fail to mention the female poet/playwrights such as Sonia Sanchez with her choice line, "What a white woman got cept her white pussy...."
Ancestor Amiri Baraka and Marvin X enjoyed a 47 year friendship. He literally grew up as part of the Baraka family. Amina says when Marvin X came to stay with us, we knew we were going laugh and be happy!
vMrs. Amina Baraka. Marvin X has read her poetry and says it is similar to the vibration of Winnie Mandela and Nelson. You don't really want to hear what Amina got to say,but you shall! Amina is one of the greatest revolutionary women in my life. If I could tell her story, I would, but let women tell it. You don't want to hear my version! As Sun Ra taught, you don't want to hear the low down dirty truth!
Artist Emory Douglas came into the Black House as a poet reciting his poem Revolutionary Things.
Marvin X welcomed Emory along with Samuel Napier and others who became members of the BPP.
Marvin took Eldridge Cleaver to Bobby Seale's house in North Oakland, after which Eldridge joined the BPP as Minister of Information.
The counter part of the BAM linguistic revolution was Cleaver's use of similar speech in the Black Liberation Movement, although we must understand the BAM and BLM were one fist in the devil's eye!
Marvin X is one of the few still true to the BAM linguistic tradition. Riding home from NYC to Newark with Amiri and Amina Baraka, Marvin recited a poem in the car until Amiri told him to shut up in the presence of Amina. Marvin was shocked to be censored by the man who helped teach him how to say motherfucker, although he did learn how to say motherfucker growing up on the streets of West Oakland. Listen to a line from a Baraka poem, "Back against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick up...." In Dutchman, he said, "Up your ass, feeble-minded ofay! Up your ass...."
Marvin's chapbook Fly to Allah established him as the father of the literary genre known as Muslim America literature, according to Dr. Mohja Kahf, Professor of English and Islamic Literature at the University Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Poet/novelist/professor Dr. Mohja KahfFly to Allah was written during his days in Harlem, 1968-69, while under the influence of the Nation of Islam and contained no "bad words," i.e., profanity. Sonia Sanchez cleaned up her mouth while she was in the Nation of Islam.
Sonia Sanchez, Queen of the Black Arts Movement
Angela Davis, Marvin and Sonia Sanchez
On a few occasions, Marvin X tried to accommodate the Muslim puritans, revolutionary puritans and the black bourgeoisie. In TDR, The Drama Review, Marvin X published a B version of Flowers for the Trashman called Take Care of Business, later made into a musical arranged by Sun Ra and his Arkestra. In his puritan Muslim madness, Marvin took out a sex scene in TCB. When Sun Ra learned of this, he scolded Marvin for taking out the best scene in the play. "Marvin, you want to be so right you're wrong! The people don't want the truth, they want the low down dirty truth!"
Marvin X and Sun Ra, two of the most advanced minds of the Black Arts Movement. They lived on the other side of time, Sun Ra would say. Gemini twins: Sun Ra, May 22, Marvin X, May 29.
In his recovery classic One Day in the Life, critic Wanda Sabir said the language was so strong it would knock the socks off old ladies!' FYI, hearing of Wanda's comment, some "old ladies" said they wanted their socks knocked off! The play became a cult classic in the Bay Area recovery community. Well, the language and situations were so raw, some recovering addicts cried like they were at their mama's funeral. When Marvin confronted the lady in the lobby of San Francisco's Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, she told him she was crying because she saw her life on stage and it was overwhelming.
But the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre director's Stanley Williams and Quentin Easter, told Marvin the Black bourgeoisie wanted to support his recovery drama but the language was too strong for them. Indeed, after hearing his language, there were wives who marched their husbands out of the theatre. Again, Marvin wrote a B script to accommodate the bourgeoisie negroes, but they still did not support his drama seen by recovering addicts of every stripe, including gays, lesbians, prostitutes, Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, et al. Alas, when the recovering audience came again to see One Day in the Life, they were horrified to learn he had accommodated the bourgeoisie with a Miller Lite version and consequently walked out in disgust. For sure, Marvin X found the recovery audience the most down to earth audience of all and they knew the script and refused to accept his B version to satisfy the linguistic proclivities of the bourgeoisie negroes.
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Umar ben Hasan and Abiodun of the Last Poets, comrades of Marvin X since their Harlem days, 1968-69. The Last Poets extended the psycho-linguistic revolution into Rap although the rappers made the BAM language reactionary at the behest of record producers representing the oppressors in their attempt to crush Black Liberation. First, crush the psyche, flip the language into non-sense and the ass will follow! In the pic below, Marvin and Felipe Luciano of The Last Poets. At the NYU memorial for Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez, Felipe told the audience, "Marvin X is a motherfucker!"
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memorial day
Memorial Day, 2007
I am a veteran
Not of foreign battlefields
Like my father in world war one
My uncles in world war two
And Korea
Or my friends from Vietnam
And even the Congo “police action”
But veteran none the less
Exiled and jailed because I refused
To visit Vietnam as a running dog for imperialism
So I visited Canada, Mexico and Belize
Then Federal prison for a minute
But veteran I am of the war in the hood
The war of domestic colonialism and neo-colonialism
White supremacy in black face war
Fighting for black power that turned white
Or was always white as in the other white people
So war it was and is
Every day without end no RR no respite just war
For colors like kindergarten children war
For turf warriors don’t own and run when popo comes
War for drugs and guns and women
War for hatred jealousy
Dante got a scholarship but couldn’t get on the plane
The boyz in the hood met him on the block and jacked him
Relieved him of his gear shot him in the head because he could read
Play basketball had all the pretty girls a square
The boyz wanted him dead like themselves
Wanted him to have a shrine with liquor bottles and teddy bears
And candles
Wanted his mama and daddy to weep and mourn at the funeral
Like all the other moms and dads and uncle aunts cousins
Why should he make it out the war zone
The blood and broken bones of war in the hood
No veterans day no benefits no mental health sessions
No conversation who cares who wants to know about the dead
In the hood
the warriors gone down in the ghetto night
We heard the Uzi at 3am and saw the body on the steps until 3 pm
When the coroner finally arrived as children passed from school
I am the veteran of ghetto wars of liberation that were aborted
And morphed into wars of self destruction
With drugs supplied from police vans
Guns diverted from the army base and sold 24/7 behind the Arab store.
Junior is 14 but the main arms merchant in the hood
He sells guns from his backpack
His daddy wants to know how he get all them guns
But Junior don’t tell cause he warrior
He’s lost more friends than I the elder
What can I tell him about death and blood and bones
He says he will get rich or die trying
But life is for love not money
And if he lives he will learn.
If he makes it out the war zone to another world
Where they murder in suits and suites
And golf courses and yachts
if he makes it even beyond this world
He will learn that love is better than money
For he was once on the auction block and sold as a thing
For money, yes, for the love of money but not for love
And so his memory is short and absent of truth
The war in the hood has tricked him into the slave past
Like a programmed monkey he acts out the slave auction
The sale of himself on the corner with his homeys
Trying to pose cool in the war zone
I will tell him the truth and maybe one day it will hit him like a bullet
In the head
It will hit him multiple times in the brain until he awakens to the real battle
In the turf of his mind.
And he will stand tall and deliver himself to the altar of truth to be a witness
Along with his homeys
They will take charge of their posts
They will indeed claim their turf and it will be theirs forever
Not for a moment in the night
But in the day and in the tomorrows
And the war will be over
No more sorrow no more blood and bones
No more shrines on the corner with liquor bottles teddy bears and candles.
--Marvin X
25 May 2007
Brooklyn NY
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keep oakland creative calls for community input on new city budget
May 24 at 8:54 PM
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Black Bird Press News & Review: Psycho-linguistics and the Black Arts Movement
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nyc african arts festival
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theatre in india
THEATER PERFORMANCES
Beyond Borders Production
The Creative Arts (TCA)
Exciting, experimental things happen at The Creative Arts Theater (TCA) in Kolkata, India. Established
by Ramanjit Kaur, Director, in 2002, TCA uses the medium of theater to expand the imagination and
experiences of children and adults new to theater. Plays develop through improvisation and explore often
painful territory through collaborative dialogue across the arts. Productions are interactive on multiple
levels—among artists from different fields and between actors and audience (http://www.thecreativearts.org).
Nowhere is this intensity more apparent than in TCA’s head-on approach to the plight of women.
Theater as Therapy
In India and elsewhere women are voiceless, second-class citizens with limited opportunities, constrained
by institutionalized patriarchal constructs. In TCA’s theater therapy, deep, self-probing, self-actualization
theatrical training exercises demand that the participants connect with and bear their hearts and souls, their
anxieties, secrets, sorrows and joys. The training empowers women to find their voices, to gain the confidence
needed to engage in the world discourse around them and to build productive mutually beneficial relationships
with family and friends. TCA training exhilarates. It awakens, or reawakens, a woman’s awareness of and
commitment to the importance of self and having a voice in our collective humanity.
Beyond Borders Production
The all-female cast of Beyond Borders explores boundaries of nationality, caste, color, ethnicity, gender,
sexuality—all those walls men erect to garner socio-economic resources to ease their fears, insecurities, and
hunger for power. Beyond Borders questions whether these boundaries are more important than humanity itself.
Two poems by Neal Hall – Blood On Our Hands and Where Do I Sit- were used to inform the play and to provide
dialogue.
The Poet-Collaborator’s Response
I was honored to have participated in this brilliant production. Rarely does one have the chance
to witness complete mastery and genius merged together on the same stage. Beyond Borders does
this in the most powerful means possible. On par, if not surpassing Les Miserables, Beyond Borders
is one of the best, if not the best, theater productions I’ve ever witnessed. It is a remarkable, must-see
production.
It began with an entrance that grabs your sight and inches its way step by step, act by act to snatch your
soul from your chest and have you exam it, in its role in racism, sexism, class and caste offenses against
our common humanity. The powerful actresses were committed to telling, embodying, crying, bleeding
these issues on the canvas of the stage. There were no let downs in passion, intensity, the acting from one
actress to the next. Each equally carried the weight of our offensives on their backs and shoulders across
Borders’ stage.
The background narratives of the production were just as powerful, informative and harmonious as the
spotlighted narratives dramatized in the stage foreground. Much was said without words. In many portions
of the play words would never, could never convey, speak definitively of the gut –wrenching pain the
actresses dig so deep from inside themselves, their personal pains and sadness, to bring forth to listening
hearts. The ending leaves you wanting the beginning again.
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Talk Africa— Africa's security in 2016 12/11/2016
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The Global African - Mexican Afro-descendants
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More Pages to Explore .....
